[LAU] Hard lock-ups -- Trying to narrow the cause

For the past 6-8 months, I've been having issues with hard lock-ups on my computer. Strangely enough, they occur the most, and are predictable, when I'm playing back longer Flash videos in a browser (watching Leo Laporte's live TV stream is a guaranteed show-stopper). It all started when I got my new Echo MiaMIDI card. At first I thought it was a bad card, but it ran just fine in another machine for about a week or so, no issues. Now I'm trying to determine if there is some kind of driver issue or maybe a driver conflict. First off, I'd like to mention that every time I install a new Linux distro, it's a major chore getting this card working, as it involves compiling ALSA from source. I'm running the latest Ubuntu Studio at the moment, and even though they included a driver for the Mia, it didn't seem to load right, even though modprobe didn't complain, and restarting the computer caused yet another lock-up. At the moment, I went ahead and compiled the driver from 1.0.18a sources myself, along with the firmware, installed that, and even though I've run into a few hiccups (a lock-up during boot being one), the card is functioning at the moment. I'm also skipping the proprietary NVidia driver for a period of time, just to see if that (or a conflict with it) might be the cause. I seem to remember a number of people having some interesting issues using higher-end cards with PulseAudio. I'm beginning to wonder now if Pulse might be my primary culprit. If that be the case, since I don't really want it around anyway, does anyone have a pointer to any instructions on how it might be removed from Ubuntu Studio 9.04? If I do end up removing Pulse, that does leave me with a bit of an issue, as the Echo drivers don't do any sound mixing from different applications asking for the driver. So, I'll need a sound daemon of some sort in order for the computer to continue to be usable. Thank you very much for any help. Regards, Darren Landrum